Roadside Crosses (Kathryn Dance 2)

"Did you hear about the Litter Boy?"

"Who?"

"Happened in Kyoto a few years ago. Japan. A teenage boy tossed a fast food wrapper and soda cup on the ground in a park. Somebody shot a picture of the kid doing it on their cell phone and uploaded it to his friends. Next thing, it started appearing on blogs and social networking sites all over the country. Cybervigilantes tracked him down. They got his name and address and posted the info online. It spread to thousands of blogs. The whole thing became a witch hunt. People began showing up at his house--throwing trash in the yard. He nearly killed himself--that kind of dishonor is significant in Japan." Boling's tonal quality and body language revealed anger. "Critics say, oh, it's just words or pictures. But they can be weapons too. They can cause just as much damage as fists. And, frankly, I think the scars last longer."

Dance said, "I don't get some of the vocabulary in the posts."

He laughed. "Oh, in blogs and bulletin boards and social networking sites, it's in to misspell, abbreviate and make up words. 'Sauce' for 'source.' 'Moar' for 'more.' 'IMHO' is 'in my humble opinion.'"

"Do I dare ask? 'FOAD.' "

"Oh," he said, "a polite valediction to your note. It means 'Fuck off and die.' All caps, of course, is the same as shouting."

"And what is 'p-h-r-3-3-k'?"

"That's leetspeak for 'freak.' "

"Leetspeak?"

"It's a sort of language that's been created by teens over the past few years. You only see it with keyboarded text. Numbers and symbols take the place of letters. And spellings are altered. Leetspeak comes from 'elite,' as in the best and the chicest. It can be incomprehensible to us old folks. But anybody who's mastered it can write and read it as fast as we do English."

"Why do kids use it?"

"Because it's creative and unconventional . . . and cool. Which, by the way, you should spell 'K-E-W-L.' "

"The spelling and grammar are awful."

"True, but it doesn't mean the posters are necessarily stupid or uneducated. It's just the convention nowadays. And speed is important. As long as the reader can understand what you're saying, you can be as careless as you want."

Dance said, "I wonder who the boy is. I guess I could call CHP about the accident Chilton refers to."

"Oh, I'll find it. The online world is huge but it's also small. I've got Tammy's social networking site here. She spends most of her time in one called OurWorld. It's bigger than Facebook and MySpace. It's got a hundred thirty million members."

"A hundred thirty million?"

"Yep. Bigger than most countries." Boling was squinting as he typed. "Okay, I'm in her account, just do a little cross-referencing. . . . There. Got him."

"That fast?"

"Yep. His name's Travis Brigham. You're right. He's a junior at Robert Louis Stevenson High in Monterey. Going to be a senior this fall. Lives in Pacific Grove."

Where Dance and her children lived.

"I'm looking over some of the postings in OurWorld about the accident. Looks like he was driving a car back from a party and lost control. Two girls were killed, another one ended up in the hospital. He wasn't badly injured. No charges were filed--there was some question about the condition of the road. It'd been raining."

"That! Sure. I remember it." Parents always recall fatal car crashes involving youngsters. And, of course, she felt a sting of memory from several years ago: the highway patrol officer calling her at home, asking if she was FBI Agent Bill Swenson's wife. Why was he asking? she'd wondered.

I'm sorry to tell you, Agent Dance . . . I'm afraid there's been an accident.

She now pushed the thought away and said, "Innocent but he's still getting vilified."

"But innocence is boring," Boling said wryly. "It's no fun to post about that." He indicated the blog. "What you've got here are Vengeful Angels."

"What's that?"

"A category of cyberbullies. Vengeful Angels are vigilantes. They're attacking Travis because they think he got away with something--since he wasn't arrested after the accident. They don't believe, or trust, the police. Another category is the Power Hungry--they're closest to typical school yard bullies. They need to control others by pushing them around. Then there are the Mean Girls. They bully because, well, they're little shits. Girls, mostly, who're bored and post cruel things for the fun of it. It borders on sadism." A tinge of anger again in Boling's voice. "Bullying . . . it's a real problem. And it's getting worse. The latest statistics are that thirty-five percent of kids have been bullied or threatened online, most of them multiple times." He fell silent and his eyes narrowed.

"What, Jon?"